The reason the tardy program was written was because the author
wanted to “spruce up” tar files before posting them to the
net, mostly to remove artefacts of the development environment, without
introducing more.

The tardy program was designed to allow you to alter certain
characteristics of files after they have been included in the
tar file. Among them are:

change file owner (by number or name)

change file group (by number or name)

add directory prefix
(e.g. dot)

change file protections (e.g. from 600 to 644)

Note that all of these affect all files in the archive.

Tardy runs on almost any flavor of UNIX. The source distribution is self
configuring using a GNU Autoconf generated configure script.